Entries in A Year With Kate
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Epilogue - In which we rank films, learn Life Lessons, climb Mount Hepburn, and wrap this up with the party it deserves!

Happy New Year, everybody! Before 2014 and A Year With Kate officially end, I wanted to give us all a proper send off. If Kate got 9 more years after she retired in 1994, consider this our own ride into the sunset, complete with gifs, gifts, and thank yous.

At the beginning ofA Year With Kate, I set some unofficial goals. The most obvious was to watch all 52 films chronologically. In order to do this, I started building a stack of research that I dubbed “Mount Hepburn.” It changed size and content a bit thanks to library deadlines and a lot of late nights on ebay. To the right is a picture of Mount Hepburn at present, having outgrown my table and moved to the floor. It stands just about 3 feet tall. (I actually bought another Katharine Hepburn biography after taking this picture because I do not know how to stop.)

My second goal was to better understand a movie star that I loved. This happened in a way I didn't expect.Week by week, we watched each of Katharine Hepburn’s films add to her star image like pieces in a puzzle. She developed from prickly unformed actress in the 1930s, to glamorous star in the 1940s, to "spinster" and great actress in the 1950s, to living legend in the 1960s.From the 1970s on, Katharine Hepburn the star slowly eclipsed Katharine Hepburn the woman. Watching and writing every week, I discovered that it was that myth of Hepburn that I'd initially fallen in love with, not the person. There's nothing wrong with that. We need myths to look up to.Even after Katharine Hepburn passed away in 2003, her myth lives on. It inspires actresses, audiences, and occasionally a series like this.

As for that Major Life Lesson I was supposed to learn should Hollywood ever decide to buy the movie rights: I actually did learn something life-changing this year. Watching Katharine Hepburn age like good wine over 62 years, I learned about time. Life is short, but life is very large, too. With help and determination, you have the potential to fill your life extraordinary things. You might make mistakes. You might make Spitfire. But think of how much more there still is for you to do. That’s a pretty incredible thing, the depth of a life. I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what else I can do with mine.

Speaking of which, as a thank you to the amazing TFE community, and in answer to those of you who’ve asked: A YEAR WITH KATE IS BECOMING A BOOK!

A Year With Kate the book will expand on the series, with full entries on every film, updated Box Office charts, and even some fun trivia and lists. We're kicking around a few different ideas for how best to get A Year With Kate into your hands and onto your e-readers, but know that it will happen in 2015. For now, you can sign up for email updates using this form (Facebook account not required).

Last, but not least, here is my Top 10 List. Please note that this is a carefully thought through list based on months of research and personal bias. I tried to take into consideration career placement, iconic status, acting skill, and just plain fun. Post your list in the comments below!

Thank all of you lovely readers for watching the movies when you could, commenting even when you couldn’t, and providing insight, humor, and conversation every week. You made 2014 a truly life-changing year. Here’s to 2015, and the possibilities ahead.

After 52 weeks, 62 years, and over 90 hours of movie-watching, we have arrived at the end of Katharine Hepburn’s career, and likewise the end of A Year With Kate. Never when I started this series did I believe that it would grow as it has. My intention when we began was simply to honor an actress I loved. From that humble beginning, A Year With Kate evolved into a series on celebrity and stardom, a box office tracker, a promoter of hair-brained hair theories and balloon puns, a Hollywood history blog, and above all a forum for everyone from superfans to newcomers to celebrate and debate classic movies.

There is so much to say (including many thank yous), so this last goodbye is being split into two. Next week we’ll have time for us. Today, appropriately enough on Christmas Eve, we will toast Katharine Hepburn with her final film, One Christmas.

Episode 51 of 52: In which In which Katharine Hepburn gives her blessing to Annette Bening and my inner actressexual weeps with joy.

A man and a woman bump into each other on a transatlantic flight. He’s charmed. She’s unimpressed. They both wear impeccably tailored suits. She banters. He flirts. A freak accident lands them on a Russian cruise ship. Their banter gives way to conversation. Their flirtation leads to longing looks and rose-tinted kisses. They both fall in love. But they’re engaged to other people.

If the opening to Love Affair sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s not a Tracy/Hepburn comedy, nor a Bogie/Bacall noir. In fact, it’s a remake of a remake, told first in 1939 (Love Affair starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer), then in 1957 (An Affair to Remember starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr), and later canonized in Nora Ephron’s 1989 film Sleepless in Seattle. The third version of Love Affair keeps the story intact: Terry McKay (Annette Bening) and Mike Gambril (Warren Beatty) start an affair on a cruise and promise to meet in three months at the top of the Empire State Building.

Surprisingly, the 1994 film is an even more old fashioned than its progenitors. The first two movies hold the whiff of scandal, but in his remake, Warren Beatty set out to make a simple romantic film with his new wife, Annette Bening. He even cast Katharine Hepburn, Hollywood legend, as the wisdom-spouting aunt. And while Kate only has one scene, her influence is felt throughout the film, because this is a film that is all about its stars.

Episode 50 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn starred in a movie with Jason Bateman, which will make every game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon you play significantly easier.

This is it. We’ve reached the final year of Katharine Hepburn’s career. Did Kate know that the three films she made in 1994 would be her last? Did she feel herself slowing down and decide that sixty two years in the spotlight were enough? Since she made no official announcement, it’s impossible to know Kate’s reasons for sure. Still, considering this was Kate’s last starring role, This Can’t Be Love feels like a retirement announcement.

Kate’s first final film was This Can’t Be Love, another TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn as Katharine Hepburn. Actually, she plays Marion Bennett, a world-renowned, Academy Award-winning actress who eschews public life and spends a lot of time being loveably grouchy to her chauffeur (an adorable puppydog-ish Jason Bateman). In Bennett’s younger days, she’d had a torrid offscreen affair with her co-star Michael Reyman (Anthony Quinn). Umpteen years later, Reyman has re-entered Marion’s life, but his intentions are more than merely amorous.

It’s a formula we know well by now, so let’s just settle in and enjoy it. Sprinkle the script with references to Kate’s career, add bits of Quinn’s womanizing past, mix in an opposites attract romance that sounds almost-but-not-quite-unlike Tracy & Hepburn, shake vigorously, and let the sophomoric senior squabbling begin. I actually considered making a drinking game out of counting Katharine Hepburn meta-references, but realized I’d get alcohol poisoning in the first hour. The African Queen, her brother Tom, Coco, her childhood nickname “Jimmy,” Song of Love, and even Rooster Cogburn get a shoutout. My favorite comes from Kate directly. It's a bit of dialog meant to echo the statue metaphor from The Philadelphia Story: “He put me on a pedestal. Good view, but awfully lonely up there.”

Episode 49 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn, octogenarian and Academy Award-winning legend, wrestles a convict and wins.

“You’re too old not to be interesting,” Ryan O’Neal tells Katharine Hepburn midway through The Man Upstairs. As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s, that certainly turned out to be the case for Kate. The formerly private star was now the subject of documentaries, interviews, and the 1990 Kennedy Centers Honors. When she released her autobiography Me: Stories of My Life in 1992, it would have been fair to say that Kate was the busiest recluse in the business.

By this time, there had been so many biographies, interviews, and fictionalizations of her life--of which The Man Upstairs would prove to be another example--so Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography was her chance to set her life in stone once and for all. Told in Hepburn’s typical forthright, conversational style, Me: Stories From My Life may not be the most linear (or truthful) autobiography, but it is a fascinating character study nonetheless.

With all of this energy being put into the performance of being Katharine Hepburn (in book form and the accompanying TV special All About Me), Kate had precious little to devote to actual film projects, which may explain the underwhelming quality of The Man Upstairs. Our own Kate plays Victoria, a misanthrope living alone with only her maid and relations for company. Her life is shaken when an inept escaped convict named Mooney (Ryan O’Neal) takes up not-so-secret residence in her attic.

Kate takes great joy throughout the movie in alternately snapping and smiling at her costars. (She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her efforts.) O’Neal matches her in energy, but his oily charms slide into a whine too often. Because this is a holiday TV movie, the convict and the hermit become bosom friends, and he teaches her the true meaning of Christmas. The film is overall pretty formulaic, but it does give 85-year-old Kate the opportunity to smack 51-year-old Ryan O’Neal with her cane and wrestle a gun away from him. It’s the little things that make these movies, y'know?

Stars! They’re just like us! Except that they aren’t. An entire media industry has been built around bringing our cultural idols closer to us--Twitter alone delivers the illusion of intimacy 140 characters at a time--but at the end of the day, would you actually want to live with one? When George S. Kaufman had to host Radio Personality and Famous Critic Alexander Woollcott for a week, the experience was so aggravating that the playwright and his partner Moss Hart wrote a scathingly funny satire about Woollcott called The Man Who Came To Dinner. I bring this up for two reasons: 1) It’s a great Christmas comedy starring Bette Davis so go watch it right now if you haven’t and 2) This seems to have been more or less James Prideaux’s motivation when he wrote Laura Lansing Slept Here. If Prideaux is to be believed, Katharine Hepburn was witty, charming, and a gigantic pain in the ass.

Kate has played a lot of characters inspired by or based on her in some way, but Laura Lansing may be the most bluntly biographical since Tracy Lord. Laura is no actress, but a different kind of star: a celebrated author with a decades-long career. As Laura’s agent explains in a convenient bit of exposition:

“You were a sensation in your 20s, a household name in your 40s, an institution in your 60s, and now…"

Sound like anyone we know? Now Laura’s publisher is dropping her because she’s too out of touch, living in her NYC penthouse and only emerging for interviews. Laura’s agent begs her to retire, but she brushes off his suggestion with the typical Hepburn handwave. Instead, Laura makes a wager with him, the point of which can only be to move the plot forward: She will stay with an “average” family in Long Island for a week. If she flees back to the city, she must give up writing. Laura appears on the doorstep of an overworked accountant and his stay-at-home wife and immediately starts making demands. The results--to nobody’s surprise but Laura’s--are a disaster.